There has been considerable interest in monitoring the use of mobile terminals for audience measurement and/or marketing purposes. Using software and/or hardware solutions, characteristics of device usage, and media/application exposure and use may be effectively monitored. Technologies such as GPS (Global Positioning System) have also been utilized for locating and consensually tracking people through a mobile device. Items such as photographs, social media, and/or micro-blog entries via the web have been utilized for various tools built for smart phones that provide “add-on” application monitoring capabilities.
It is apparent that mobile phones or “smart phones” will emerge as a dominant digital device that people will carry with them and use on a daily basis. Smart phones will function as communication devices, authentication tools, digital wallets and keys, etc. Smart phones could also be exploited as “always-on” observers as well. Smart phone devices are possibly in the best position to become universal digital observers, being able to track locations, temperatures, movements, communication activities, proximity to other people, social interactions, etc. There is no strict limit with regard to the possible observations as various kinds of observers and sensors may be included in the smart phones. For example, in the future the smart phones might collect a rich feed of data containing comprehensive audio and video recordings relative to each day, and thus let the people generate a digital storage of their activities.
Data that can be collected in a smart phone can naturally be used locally in the same device. For instance, temperature data can be shown on the screen of the phone. However, some data may be at least occasionally worth sending to other people, for example the current location of the device might form a useful piece of information for other people considering e.g. different “buddy tracking” purposes. One drawback associated with the contemporary solutions is that they typically implement straightforward end-to-end pipelines more or less focusing on certain kinds of data items only. In addition, the users may have to manually enable or conduct the data acquisition phase and even perform dedicated follow-up actions such as sending the data by specifically selecting an update feature of the relevant application.
A number of prior art arrangements propose to collect data points, position the user, or to make contextual data points locally available to other applications of the particular phone. For example, prior art publication WO2008/118119, incorporated by reference herein, discloses a mobile device and a method for communicating positioning data of the mobile device to a server at a periodic interval, then automatically generating in the mobile device, in response to the server, a present location profile associated with a present geographic location of the mobile device, simultaneously generating, in the mobile device, a set of adjacent profiles provided by the server as being a direction away from the present geographic location of the mobile device, and refreshing in the mobile device, the present location profile and the set of adjacent profiles at the periodic interval.
While many different areas of device and/or media monitoring is available, further improvements in device/media monitoring is desired. For the purposes of this disclosure, “monitoring” may include monitoring of data accessed, created and/or reproduced on a device, and may further include usage and data produced from “apps,” “widgets,” or other executable software residing on a device, as well as network and/or data usage. Different monitoring capabilities carry with them specific costs computationally and practically. Generically selecting one or more panels for monitoring is a relatively straightforward matter, as individual panelists are manually selected according to demographic or other data available. However, automatically creating and maintaining panels and sub-panels via processor-based systems has shown to be difficult, as this requires numerous considerations to be taken into account in a substantially real-time manner. As such, there is a need in the art to address these, and other, drawbacks currently existing in the art.